Tag Archives: Frederik Pohl

Every evening, after supper and perhaps an hour or so of television, AJ would fill a thermos with hot coffee, check his tape recorder to make sure the batteries were healthy and there was plenty of tape, kiss his wife, Edna, good night and then get into his car and drive away. Drive where? That didn’t matter because he wasn’t sightseeing. What he was doing, Scheherazade-like, was dictating a new story each night, though instead of into the impatient ears of a threatening sultan it went no farther than a spool of magnetic tape — at least, not until AJ got home sometime in that early morning, dumped the filled tape spools next to Edna’s typewriter and went cheerfully off to sleep. Edna was an excellent typist, so by the time A J shambled into the kitchen for breakfast around early afternoon, the manuscript was ready to be shown to an editor.

Now is as good a time as any to restate my opinion that Frederik Pohl’s blog is one of the best writer’s sites to be found on the Intertubes.

Every evening, after supper and perhaps an hour or so of television, AJ would fill a thermos with hot coffee, check his tape recorder to make sure the batteries were healthy and there was plenty of tape, kiss his wife, Edna, good night and then get into his car and drive away. Drive where? That didn’t matter because he wasn’t sightseeing. What he was doing, Scheherazade-like, was dictating a new story each night, though instead of into the impatient ears of a threatening sultan it went no farther than a spool of magnetic tape — at least, not until AJ got home sometime in that early morning, dumped the filled tape spools next to Edna’s typewriter and went cheerfully off to sleep. Edna was an excellent typist, so by the time A J shambled into the kitchen for breakfast around early afternoon, the manuscript was ready to be shown to an editor.

Now is as good a time as any to restate my opinion that Frederik Pohl’s blog is one of the best writer’s sites to be found on the Intertubes.

In which the pioneering rapper talks up a Los Angeles architectural landmark. Learn more about the Eames House here. Some of Ice Cube’s best raps here, here, here, and here. NSFW, unless you work at Death Row Records.

Anthony Burgess once said he would have preferred to be thought of as a musician who wrote novels, rather than a novelist who wrote music on the side. This interview with composer-conductor Paul Phillips includes samples of the late author’s symphonic and choral works, and touches on Burgess’ use of musical structures in his novels: e.g., A Clockwork Orange was patterned on the sonata form. It’s all interesting enough to make me hope Phillips’ book about Burgess and his music, A Clockwork Counterpoint, comes out in a much less pricey format.

I am seriously pumped to see the Coen Bros. adaptation of True Grit, and this advance review confirms my hunch that the Coens are simpatico with the work of Charles Portis, one of the greats of American literature. But while I’m at it, and since this movie has “Oscar bait” written all over it, let me propose a drinking game for the next Academy Awards broadcast. When True Grit bags a golden guy, have one person take a shot whenever Charles Portis gets mentioned in the thank-you speech, and have another person take a shot whenever somebody gives a shout-out to John Wayne, who starred in the first, barely adequate film version. Judging from the way the Coens handled things a couple of years ago, I expect one guest will be dry as a bone at the end of the night while the other is comatose.

If you think the treatment endured by Bradley Manning is shocking, read Zeitoun by David Eggers and learn that not only can it happen here — it’s been happening for a while.

“But the entire time I was watching the last two-thirds of the film, I could not get out of my head the fact that the foundation, the groundwork, had been so thoroughly botched that if the film had been re-contextualized as a house, it would’ve been leaning heavily to one side, with the bricks falling to the ground and the roof sliding half-off.”

Illustrator blog site Drawger presents The Museum of Forgotten Art Supplies, some of which I still use regularly. (You can take my Rapidographs when you pry them from my cold dead fingers.) Others bring back dread memories of the days when newspaper pages were assembled on flats, with stories and veloxed photos printed as blocks and strips of paper and fed through waxers by pasteup artists. This hand-held waxer, for example, was enough to give Torquemada nightmares: that little red plug was often loose or missing entirely, allowing hot wax to splash across the hand of an unwary paster-upper. How about this Freddy Kreuger manicurist set used to cut and transfer itty-bitty strips of type? Hard to believe I used to enjoy working with this stuff — I even became quite a dab hand with the proportion wheel pictured up top.

“Photographs of the novelist Kingsley Amis, taken between his fiftieth birthday in April 1972 and his death in October 1995, sometimes show a resplendent sheen on his forehead, nose, and cheeks. This is what some people call ‘sweat alcohol,’ a common problem among heavy drinkers of shorts and beer. On both of the occasions on which I had the pleasure to meet this funny and distinguished man, he drank whisky throughout lunch and by the afternoon was wearing that slightly bewildered, slightly aggressive, slightly penitent expression known as the ‘Scotch gaze,’ a look familiar to all who have walked the streets of Glasgow or Aberdeen at closing time on a Friday night. It is an expression curiously unique to whisky drinkers. You can often tell a man’s tipple just by looking at him.”

Thirty years ago, Welsh artist Kit Williams published Masquerade, a beautifully illustrated children’s book in which the paintings concealed clues to the location of a golden hare pendant Williams had buried somewhere in the British Isles. The search for the golden hare became an international craze, but when somebody did finally bag the pendant two years later, it turned out to be a cheat — instead of solving the riddle, the winner had used inside information provided by an ex-girlfriend of Williams. (The hare was last seen being auctioned by Sotheby’s to an undisclosed buyer.) Williams, whose life had been turned upside down by the obsessive interest of some fans, swore off any further treasure hunts, but four gardens in the Cotswolds are staging an equally elaborate hunt in honor of the 30th anniversary of Masquerade.

Science fiction grandmaster Frederik Pohl reminisces about his friend and (for a time) collaborator, Cyril M. Kornbluth: “He owned a book, written by one of his high-school teachers, I think, which gave the rules for composing every kind of verse I ever heard of. Cyril and I studied the book and resolved to write one of each. We made a good start, actually writing a haiku (we spelled it “hokku”), a villanelle, a sestina, two sonnets (one Petrarchan and one Shakespearean) and I think a couple of others. We bogged down when we came to the chant royal (the chant royal is HARD) and, like most of the other Futurians, we decided to try our luck with science fiction.”

Talk about trouble in paradise. Frederik Pohl is renowned as a master of science fiction, but recently he found himself living in a horror story when he discovered that he would be spending weeks on a South Seas cruise with nothing but FoxNoise for information.

Along about the tenth day, I finally figured out that, if I tuned to that channel but turned the sound down to zero, I would never have to hear the crazy-making utterances of Hannity, O’Reilly, et al anymore but could get a rough idea of what was going on in the world from the news crawl at the bottom of the screen, which, relatively speaking, was only mildly toxic.

Science fiction grandmaster Frederik Pohl has a new blog. And not a grudging, infrequently updated don’t-bother-me-with-this-Internet-crap kind of Web site like Harlan Ellison’s, but a highly readable jumping-in-with-both-feet bloggity blog blog like the ones maintained by John Scalzi, Michael Swanwick and the like. The name of the blog takes off from Pohl’s memoir, The Way the Future Was, which is as charming an autobiography as you’re likely to read. (Bird-dogged by Fred K.)